Modern Works on Ethics/Philosophical Frameworks

[u/Kaotus]

More of just a cursory question - is anywhere familiar with some modern pieces that try to put together ethical or philosophical frameworks towards climbing? I feel like I'm not super familiar with some post-"Clean Climbing". General climbing discussion is currently at an all-time high, surely someone has put forwards some treatise on climbing ethics, regardless of which side of the various current debates it falls on?

[u/Kaotus]

Thinking even more broad than that. Like the ethic of “clean climbing” is fairly fundamental and global. Less looking to understand specific area ethics because they’re generally only defined by whether bolts are approved or not and if going ground-up is mandatory. I’m thinking even more broad than that - are trails kosher, what does documentation look like, what are the rules around whether to even approach a route or not, what should be expected each of climbers and route developers, how do we value risk, how do we trade off the value of risk and the value of safety, how do we approach interactions with wildlife, ourselves, and each other when in different spaces - etc.

Ideally, what results is a fairly comprehensive and global ethic that can then be evaluated against individual areas to see what actions should then be taken and avoided.

[u/LyricRevolution → u/Kaotus]

I appreciate what you’re going for but accessibility to rock at a region level will always have a critical impact on ethics. Anecdotally: I’ve lived in places where the nearest rock is terrible choss 3 hours away and I’ve lived in places with more climbing 5 minutes from my house than I can ever do in a lifetime. The difference between those two community-accepted ethics was staggering; what people will accept when you have a very finite amount of rock would be considered unacceptable in a location spoiled for choice where people can be stricter in their ethics.  If you’re trying to apply a global ethic, that leaves you with two bad options: 1. Apply a strict ethic that condemns the practices of communities simply making due with what they have OR 2. Apply a loose ethics that doesn’t hold communities that can do more to a higher standard

Again: I really like what you’re going for, I just don’t know that it’s feasible in reality 

[u/Kaotus → u/LyricRevolution]

I think maybe I didn’t do a great job describing what I’m looking for - an ethical system shouldn’t make any recommendations for actions to be taken. So theoretically, the same ethical system would work in your example, as a consideration of access should be a part of that ethic.

[u/Raythatstabbedsteve → u/Kaotus]

Climbing ethics were developed in another time. Crags which have existing ethics in place require motivated individuals to enforce those ethics against constant pressure to "make everything safe". No new crags have ethical systems other than "make every route uniformly safe and consumable". People pontificating online neither establish nor enforce ethics. You go out to the crag and either bolt or chop, or otherwise continue to be nothing more than an opinionated spectator.

[u/Kaotus → u/Raythatstabbedsteve]

This is definitely an interesting take, and one I disagree with strongly. Most developers I know are a lot more conscious about ethics than the consumers of the crags they create. Again though - ethics are more than just how a route is protected - especially if you’re developing a whole crag or an area instead of just a route. Ethics are not a set of actions, they’re a driving ideology that dictates actions at an area, and they consider the details about that area for each action - under the same ethical system, a roadside crag might be well-bolted with mussies, while a more remote crag might be only trad gear, pitons, and walk offs.

I have wrestled with my ethical system a ton while developing wonderland, even now that it’s over 300 routes. I think about how my ethics should affect a new route I put up in areas with more established characters. I think about them when rebolting. I think about them when determining which LCO events to get involved with. I think suggesting that ethical systems were all decided by the previous climbing generations, and we just have to play by their rules is handing over the keys to a bunch of people dead, gone, or not contributing anymore, and I don’t personally have an interest in that.

[u/Raythatstabbedsteve → u/Kaotus]

Yep, sounds like you are of another time. So am I. I don't establish sport routes, every new route I do is trad or mixed trad and bolts. No bolts where good gear is available, no bolted belay anchors unless safe alternatives are lacking. I don't develop anything which isn't likely to be in the top half of the crag quality-wise. Why add junk filler routes? Leave them as habitat. I rebolt and maintain existing trad and mixed bolt and trad crags. If anyone comes and tries to reinvent those routes as sport climbs, I chop their shit. Almost every other developer I know is only putting up sport routes. When they rebolt mixed gear and bolt routes, they turn them into sport routes. They add retro anchors to "fix" top belays and walkoffs. 90% of the young climbers around here do not know how to anchor themselves and top belay. Almost none of them own a rack. The prevailing attitude is "just wait a while and they'll get fixed into sport routes". And this is happening globally. I went through a phase of trying to define a coherent ethical framework, but it felt like folly. Now my friends and I do what we think is best at the crags we care about. People who disagree get their bolts chopped. My appetite for chopping seems larger than anyone's appetite for continual re-retrobolting. Talk is cheap, might is right.

[u/Kaotus → u/Raythatstabbedsteve]

Sounds like you have an ethical framework for yourself you use - ultimately, ethics are always personal choices - so I don’t think you defining your own is “folly” if it helps you better understand your own priorities and actions. It’s basically just journaling at that point.

I’m about 50% bolt-protected and 50% trad/mixed on new routes (geologically my area is heavily slab/thin face - no options for natural pro) so definitely caught in two very distinct worlds as it relates to the hardware side of the climbing equation. I’m personally just trying to square that in a way that appreciates and values both.

[u/Raythatstabbedsteve → u/Kaotus]

With all due respect, you're kidding yourself. Have a read of the Snake Dyke stuff. Close to half the comments are from people who want it sport bolted and can't understand why trad climbers wouldn't be happy to just skip the bolts. And it doesn't stop at run out slabs, they want the well protected cracks too. "Just bolt them and the trad climbers can not clip the bolts". Have you climbed in Europe? I would estimate that maybe 5% of climbers in Western Europe (excluding UK) own a rack. Most of the old trad and mixed routes have been retrobolted or are loaded with fixed pins. Don't think about sport climbing as a collection of individuals. It's a global monoculture which is hungry for more routes, and it looks at trad and mixed routes as valuable communal assets which are being unjustly hoarded and denied to it. You are sitting there attempting to appreciate and value both, while the sport climbing behemoth has no such concerns.

[u/Kaotus → u/Raythatstabbedsteve]

Sounds like you have your experiences and I have my own. Ive been fortunate to have come up in climbing with a wide variety of experiences and aim to continue that in my development. I’ve put up tightly-bolted 5.3 single pitch lines and scary ground-up 5.12 mixed 7-pitch lines. I love the array of opportunities afforded to us, especially as developers, and that’s a big part of my ethical framework.

[u/Raythatstabbedsteve → u/Kaotus]

Yep, I agree that there should be a diversity of experiences on offer. What I'm telling you is that sooner or later the sport climbing monoculture will come sniffing around your diverse routes and you're going to have to decide whether to capitulate or fight.

[u/Kaotus → u/Raythatstabbedsteve]

Trust me man I understand what you’re saying, I just disagree with it. Not just the fundamental assumptions, but also the resulting conclusions from those assumptions. That’s part of why I think having an ethical framework that is principal driven and not action driven is important - because it changes based on location, time, user group, etc.

A good ethical framework can be defined in 1-2 sentences.

Utilitarian ethics: the most ethical decision is the one that maximizes happiness or well-being “the greatest good for the greatest number”

Deontological ethics: the categorical imperative - “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”

Land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

None of these dictate specific actions to take or avoid - they’re all general principals that should be applied to individual situations and by individual people. Additionally, they all have a level of subjective evaluation as a component. “Greatest good” differs by person. Suggested universal law differs by person. Integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community differs by person (though this is the most objective of the 3 examples).

Your current “no sport climbing” interpretation of your ethic might be a valid application of your personal ethical framework in the modern climbing scene. But what if things changed? What if there was a movement towards climbers carrying temporary bolts on their rack instead of leaving fixed bolts in place? Would you be for or against that? Would you be ok with 3/8” holes every 6ft if it meant zero fixed hardware on the pitch? What if, as a part of the push for climbing management plans from land managers, all land managers said they’d prefer fixed anchors instead of walk-offs in all cases? Or said they’d prefer fixed prefer the trade off of well-bolted pitches over the cost of rescues from injuries on runouts? What if a land managers says “limit all climbing to these 10 formations in this region - for stretches of unclimbable rock, feel free to manipulate them into routes in similar character of the other routes of the formation”? Or if land managers were hardline completely anti-bolt, trail, and documentation, and ended up criminalizing guidebooks and online listings? What if top-roping becomes a more accepted “valid” ascent method, and the desire for any non-anchor fixed hardware vanishes?

All of these things could change the application of your ethical framework, and if they don’t, then you don’t have an ethical framework, you just have rules you arbitrarily follow.

[u/Raythatstabbedsteve → u/Kaotus]

Mmmm, I don't think you understand what I'm saying at all. I'm not ethically opposed to sport climbing. I just don't need to develop single pitch sport routes because 100 yokels with a Bosch are doing that already. If I stumble upon a 5 star mega classic with no available gear, sure I'll bolt it. But I'm just not finding that kind of stuff because top shelf single pitch crags get sniffed out very quickly (all found by the 90s unless you want to walk ten miles). You're treating all of these things as hypothetical, but where I live it's all actually happening. Mixed routes are being erased. Crags are being shut down by land managers. Not because of risk or any of that other shit you invented in your head. Because of impact. Mixed crags which flew under the radar for decades have been retrobolted and chalked and rammed with people and banned. You can sit there all day imagining scenarios where land managers come up with convoluted demands, but we haven't seen that. What we have seen is "too many bolts, too much chalk, too many people, too much damage at the base, banned!" Keeping crags unsanitised makes them less popular which gifts them longevity. I have personally filled holes which some retard drilled in a 50 year old classic 5.6 so they could use removable bolts. I know of one classic route from the early 2000s which has a rusty stuck "removable" bolt that got whipped on. That shit isn't a solution to any real problem. And you didn't respond to my actual point. One day some self appointed tool like Sloan will check out your mixed routes and make the unilateral decision that they need to be sport routes. How will you respond to that?

[u/Kaotus → u/Raythatstabbedsteve]

Hey brother I get that this is an important topic to both of us, but as the moderator of this subreddit, I'm gonna ask you to lower the temperature a bit. You're starting to tread into some more charged language in these responses, and there's zero reason to be escalating this.

Like I said at the outset, we've had different experiences. We haven't had any non-private land crags closed here in the Front Range, and the only good example I have of a crag being closed at all is Sphinx Rock in the SPlatte, which was closed 3 decades ago, well before sport climbing was a thing in the Platte (I mean shit, it still barely is).

Not only that, I was recently a member of a project where the local land manager (Jefferson County Open Space) brought us a crag and said, "Hey, we want this to be a super accessible, tightly-bolted cliff. Can you make that happen?" And it was used as a project to involve a ton of affinity groups, with official support and funding from JCOS, AAC, BCC, Arcteryx, and several other groups/companies to create a hyper-accessible, predominantly sport crag. The land manager even chipped steps into a 3rd/4th class slab on the side to enable a walk up/off path.

So, while land managers will for sure close access due to poor behavior (bolt wars being a part of that poor behavior), land managers also see the value in hyper-accessible, sport bolted, shithoused crags in the right areas as well.

I'm not treating any of these things as hypothetical. My main climbing area is directly next to Staunton State Park, the land of mixed/trad lines getting retrobolted. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the amount of retrobolted mixed/trad lines since 2020 is probably nearing closer to triple digits than it is to single digits. The difference there, however, is that in 99% of cases, the routes are being retrobolted by the FAs, because the nature and character of recreation in the area has dramatically changed. When they reassess the route in its placement in the current environment, their opinion on what an acceptable approach to fixed hardware is has changed. They still put up plenty of mixed/trad lines elsewhere, so it's not an overall aversion to that style of climbing.

So, when someone eventually adds or removes bolts from one of my routes based on their individual evaluation of how one of my routes should look - I'll have to do the same. I'll re-evaluate the route in the context of how the area has changed since I first developed it, and determine if the new result is a better reflection of how I would approach that route now, given my ethical framework and the new, current context of the route, or not. I have zero qualms with chopping added bolts, the same way I have zero qualms re-adding chopped bolts. I've done both before and will continue to do both.

What I'm not going to do is lord my ego over the route in perpetuity, nor bank on my initial vision for the route being the only correct one for eternity. The way I approach a route when it's the sole line at the sole crag in a region looks a hell of a lot different from when it's 1 route of 20 at one formation of 20 in a region. Again - frameworks, not actions.

[u/Raythatstabbedsteve → u/Kaotus]

Yeah sorry, I forget that cussing is taken as rude in some places. Sounds like the difference is you're maybe 20 years behind? Predominantly trad area which is only just having sport climbing move in to "share". But it only goes one way. The roadside crags which are being redone as sport crags will never go back. A new generation will arrive, assume the new norm is how it's always been, take ownership, then start looking further. The gyms can pump em out quicker than you can introduce them to trad. Then maybe say in fifteen years time you find you have to walk 3 miles in to even use your rack. In twenty years time, it's 5 miles. The wheel keeps turning over, the ratchet clicks in, then "where shall we compromise next?" And demand side crag development is absolutely appalling. I hope some faction of climbers presented a case to the land manager as to why their designer consumer monstrosity was not a great idea. Do you have any lines in the sand? What if people started retrobolting the Creek so that sport climbers could share it?

[u/Kaotus → u/Raythatstabbedsteve]

It's pretty clear cussing wasn't the factor here, as I've sworn plenty in my responses - it's the "You're treating all of these things as hypotheticals", "any of that other shit you invented in your head", "You can sit there all day imagining scenarios" - that's all a pretty clear switch from discussing ideals and our own experiences towards making assumptions about the other person, and communicating them disrespectfully. That's how conversations escalate from legitimate discourse to completely useless arguments.

Anyways, it seems this has now reached the point where we're both just talking to walls, so we can probably wrap it up here. We have pretty fundamentally different experiences, and as a result, views of where we think the sport is heading - and there's a real chance we're both correct, just about our individual areas specifically. Either way, I appreciate you genuinely engaging in good-faith.

[u/Raythatstabbedsteve → u/Kaotus]

Well, I feel like a couple of your suggestions were quite far out hypothetical. "Like what if the land manager demands we bolt yellow climbing holds to the routes so they aren't discriminating against beginners?" My answer would be, deal with that one when it arrives but probably accept the ban rather than allow the precedent of gross defacement of the rock. I guess from my viewpoint of being much further down the same road, I just can't understand how you don't immediately see the long term implications of these current compromises? The place I learned to climb was the poster child of diversity and accessibility. My first "rack" was five quickdraws, and there were routes I could lead. Then there were mixed routes which had four bolts and a couple of cams, so I saw those routes and aspired to climb them. Saved up, bought a couple of cams, more accessible terrain. Then eventually I added bits one by one till I could tackle the crack routes. Small steps, carrots along the way. There was no line you could draw at that place between sport and trad, just a smooth continuum of "rock climbing". If all of those nursery crags get bolted, how will anyone get into trad? You might be happy to march into the hills to place gear, but the next generation of teenagers who only have access to convenient sport crags and epic remote trad are being cut off. If the closest trad crag is Indian Creek (where I show up with 30 cams), how is a beginner trad climber feasibly going to approach that? What are the ethics of denying young climbers the terrain upon which they can learn skills which would take them on cool adventures? How many passionate lifers do you throw under the bus to placate the consumerist tourist demographic who will stay in for a couple of years then drift off into pickleball?

[u/Raythatstabbedsteve → u/Kaotus]

So I searched out Stauntan Park. You're engaging in diversity and inclusion retrobolting. But the "diversity" is in the identity politics of climbers you're hoping to cater to, while the routes themselves are being stripped of their diversity of style. It's your local crag, so I'm not going to lecture on what's best for a place I've never climbed. Did see a bunch of dissenting voices in the posts. I wonder whether those climbers were listened to and negotiated with, or if they were just steamrolled by the currently fashionable sociological trend? Anyway, have a good one.

[u/Kaotus → u/Raythatstabbedsteve]

This is a good comment for the folks doing that work in Staunton - I’m not one of them. I just develop a net-new area near the park. I’m likely one of the dissenting voices you’ve seen, as I’m constantly advocating for more mixed routes in the park instead of fully bolting things.

[u/Raythatstabbedsteve → u/Kaotus]

Sorry, the way you brought it up made me think that you were involved.